Revelation 20:15

In Enoch (xxxviii. 5, xlviii. 9) the wicked are handed over by God to the saints, before whom they burn like straw in fire and sink like lead in water. The milder spirit of the Christian prophet abstains from making the saints thus punish or witness the punishment of the doomed (cf. on Revelation 14:10). In Apoc. Pet. 25 the souls of the murdered gaze on the torture of their former persecutors, crying ὁ θεὸς, δικαία σου ἡ κρίσις. These features, together with those of torturing angels (Dieterich, 60 f.) and Dantesque gradations of punishment (Dieterich, 206 f.), are conspicuous by their absence from John's Apocalypse. There is a stern simplicity about the whole description, and just enough pictorial detail is given to make the passage morally suggestive. As gehenna, like paradise (4 Ezra 3:4), was created before the world, according to rabbinic belief (Gfrörer, ii. 42 46), it naturally survived the collapse of the latter (Revelation 20:11). Contrast with this passage the relentless spirit of 4. Esd. 7:49 f. (“I will not mourn over the multitude of the perishing … they are set on fire and burn hotly and are quenched”). If John betrays no pity for the doomed, he exhibits no callous scorn for their fate. The order of Revelation 20:13-15 and Revelation 21:1 f. is the same as in the haggadic pseudo-Philonic De Biblic. Anti-quitatibus (after 70 A.D.) where the judgment (“reddet infernus debitum suum et perditio restituet paratecen suam, ut reddam unicuique secundum opera sua”) is followed by the renewal of all things (“et exstinguetur mors et infernus claudet os suum … et erit terra alia et caelum aliud habitaculum sempiternum”).

So much for the doomed. The bliss of saints occupies the closing vision (Revelation 21:1 to Revelation 22:5). From the smoke and pain and heat it is a relief to pass into the clear, clean atmosphere of the eternal morning where the breath of heaven is sweet and the vast city of God sparkles like a diamond in the radiance of his presence. The dominant idea of the passage is that surroundings must be in keeping with character and prospects; consequently, as the old universe has been hopelessly sullied by sin, a new order of things must be formed, once the old scene of trial and failure is swept aside. This hope of the post-exilic Judaism (cf. Isaiah 65:17; Isaiah 66:22) was originally derived from the Persian religion, in which the renovation of the universe was a cardinal tenet; it is strongly developed in Enoch (xci. 16, civ. 2, new heaven only) and 4 Esd. 4:27 f. (“if the place where the evil is sown pass not away, there cannot come the field where the good is sown”). The expectation (cf on Romans 8:28 f.) that the loss sustained at the fall of Adam would now be made good, is handly the same as this eschatological transformation; the latter prevailed whenever the stern exigencies of the age seemed to demand a clean sweep of the universe, and the apocalyptic attitude towards nature seldom had anything of the tenderness and pathos, e.g., of 4 Esd. 8:42 48 (cf. 7:31). The sequence of Revelation 20:11 f. and Revelation 21:1 f. therefore follows the general eschatological programme, as e.g. in Apoc. Bar. xxi. 23 f., where, after death is ended (very mildly), the new world promised by God appears as the dwelling-place of the saints (cf. also 32:1 f.). The earthly Jerusalem is good enough for the millennium but not for the final bliss; the new order (Revelation 21:5) of latter (cf. above) coincides, as in Oriental religion (Jeremiah, 45 f.), with the new year (i.e., spring) festival of the god's final victory. The literary problem is more intricate. With Revelation 21:1-8, which is evidently the prophet's own composition, the Apocalypse really closes. The rest of the vision, down to Revelation 22:5, is little more than a poetical repetition and elaboration ol Revelation 21:1-8, to which Revelation 22:6 f. forms the appropriate conclusion, just as the doublet Revelation 19:9 b, Revelation 19:10 (in its present position) does to Revelation 19:1-8. When Revelation 19:9 b, Revelation 19:10 is transferred to the end of 17 (see above), the parallelism becomes even closer. Both 17 (the vision of the harlot-Babylon, with her evil influence on the world, and her transient empire) and Revelation 21:9 to Revelation 22:5 (the vision of the Lamb's pure bride, with her endless empire) are introduced alike (cf. Revelation 17:1; Revelation 21:9) and ended alike, though Revelation 22:6-8 has been slightly expanded in view of its special position as a climax to the entire Apocalypse. As 17. represents John's revision of an earlier source, this suggests, but does not prove, a similar origin for Revelation 21:9 to Revelation 22:5. He might have sketched the latter as an antithesis to the former; certainly the “editorial” brushwork in Revelation 21:9 to Revelation 22:5 is not nearly so obvious and abrupt as, e.g., in 18. Upon the other hand there are touches and traits which have been held to imply the revision of a source or sources, especially of a. Jewish character (so variously Vischer, Weyland, Ménégoz, Spitta, Sabatier, Briggs, Schmidt, S. Davidson, von Soden, de Faye, Kohler, Baljon, J. Weiss, and Forbes), delineating the new Jerusalem (cf. Revelation 21:1-2). In this event the Christian editor's hand would be visible, not necessarily in Revelation 21:22 (see note), but in the ἀρνίον -allusions, in Revelation 21:14 b, Revelation 21:23 (cf. Revelation 22:5), 25 b (= Revelation 22:5 a), and 27 (= Revelation 20:15; Revelation 21:8; Revelation 22:3 a). Another set of features (Revelation 21:12; Revelation 21:16; Revelation 21:24-27 a, Revelation 22:2 c, Revelation 22:3 a, Revelation 22:5) is explicable apart from the hypothesis of a Jewish source, or indeed of any source at all. Literally taken, they are incongruous. But since Revelation 21:9 to Revelation 22:5 may be equivalent not so much to a Jewish ideal conceived sub specie Christiana as to a Christian ideal expressed in the imaginative terms of a Jewish tradition which originally depicted an earthly Jerusalem surrounded by the respectful nations of the world, a number of traits in the latter sketch would obviously be inapplicable in the new setting to which they were transferred. These are retained, however, not only for the sake of their archaic associations but in order to lend pictorial completeness to the description of the eternal city. The author, in short, is a religious poet, not a theologian or a historian. But while these archaic details need not involve the use of a Jewish source (so rightly Schön and Wellhausen), much less a reference of the whole vision to the millennial Jerusalem (Zahn), or the ascription of it to Cerinthus (Völter) or a chiliastic Jewish Christian editor (Bruston), may not the repetitions and parallelisms, especially in view of Revelation 22:6 f., indicate a composite Christian origin, as is suggested, e.g., by Erbes (A = Revelation 21:1-4; Revelation 22:3-17; Revelation 22:20-21, [920] = Revelation 21:5-27; Revelation 22:1-2; Revelation 22:18-19) and Selwyn (Revelation 22:16-21, the conclusion of [921] = Revelation 21:2; Revelation 22:3-5; Revelation 21:3-6 a, Revelation 22:7; Revelation 21:6-8; Revelation 21:6-8; Revelation 21:6-8, or of [922] = Revelation 21:9 to Revelation 22:2; Revelation 22:6; Revelation 22:8-15)? Some dislocation of the original autograph or scribal additions may be conjectured with reason in Revelation 22:6-21 (see below), at least. But the reiterations are intelligible enough as the work of a single writer, whose aim is to impress an audience rather than to produce a piece of literature. The likelihood is that John composed Revelation 21:9 f. as an antithesis to the description of the evil city which he had reproduced from a source in 17, and that he repeated the incident of Revelation 22:8-9 (as Revelation 19:9-10 at the end of 17), adapting it to its position at the close of the whole book as well as of the immediately preceding oracle.

[920] Codex Vaticanus (sæc. iv.), published in photographic facsimile in 1889 under the care of the Abbate Cozza-Luzi.

[921] Codex Alexandrinus (sæc. v.), at the British Museum, published in photographic facsimile by Sir E. M. Thompson (1879).

[922] Codex Vaticanus (sæc. iv.), published in photographic facsimile in 1889 under the care of the Abbate Cozza-Luzi.